The Summit: Upper School Reading Challenge 2019/20
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The Summit: Upper School Reading Challenge 2019/20 M A R L B O R O U G H C O L L E G E E V E R E S T R E A D I N G C H A L L E N G E How does the challenge work? You need to read 5 books from this booklet by the end of Summer Term 2020. Every time you finish a book from the list, come and talk to Library staff about the book and we’ll record your progress, and give you a stamp. Once you have conquered the Everest Reading Challenge and collected five stamps, you will join your fellow students on an end of year trip to Pizza Hut & Cineworld. It’s like a loyalty card, with a pizza and movies reward! Stamps Collected: What’s in this book? Look out for these icons which will tell you the main themes of the books in this challenge: Masculinity/ Post- Social Class Male Identity Colonialism Femininity/ Female Comedy Time, Memory Identity Drugs, Sexuality Gothic, Horror Debauchery, Hedonism Relationships, War Satire Families Monsters, Dystopia, Post- Magical Question of Apocalypse Realism Evil Fiction in Mental Health Race Translation Morality, Growing Up, Ethics, Classic, Bildungsroman Philosophy, Modern Classic Religion Death, Grief, Pastoral Historical Bereavement Americanah/Chimanda Ngozi Adiche Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria for the West. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu heads for America, where despite her academic success, she is forced to grapple with what it means to be black for the first time. Quiet, thoughtful Obinze had hoped to join her, but with post-9/11 America closed to him, he instead plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London. Fifteen years later, they reunite in a newly democratic Nigeria, and reignite their passion—for each other and for their homeland. Themes: Race, Migration, Culture Clash, Belonging, Romance Suggested companion texts: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe Family Life by Akhil Sharma The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen The Power/Naomi Alderman All over the world women are discovering they have the power. With a flick of the fingers they can inflict terrible pain - even death. Suddenly, every man on the planet finds they have lost control. The day of the girls has arrived - but where will it end? Exploring concepts of gender, hierarchy and power, The Power is an ingenious and masterfully crafted piece of feminist science fiction as well as a searing indictment of our contemporary world. Themes: Gender, Power, Sexuality, Religious Extremism Suggested companion texts: The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter The Book of Joan by Lidia Yuknavitch Daughters of the North by Sarah Hall The Children of Men by P.D. James The Crucible by Arthur Miller Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy and Margaret Atwood Brick Lane/Monica Ali Still in her teenage years, Nazneen finds herself in an arranged marriage with a disappointed man who is twenty years older. Away from the mud and heat of her Bangladeshi village, home is now a cramped flat in a high-rise block in London's East End. Nazneen knows not a word of English, and is forced to depend on her husband. But unlike him she is practical and wise, and befriends a fellow Asian girl Razia, who helps her understand the strange ways of her adopted new British home. A superb novel about isolation, immigration and the mixing of cultures. Themes: Migration, Race, Belonging, Family & Romantic Relationships Suggested companion texts: The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy The Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri White Teeth by Zadie Smith Poetry of Kamala Das, Benjamin Zephaniah, Ruth Padel, Jackie Kay and Warsan Shire Money /Martin Amis This is the story of John Self, consumer extraordinaire. Rolling around New York and London, he makes deals, spends wildly and does reckless movie-world business, all the while grabbing everything he can to sate his massive appetites: alcohol, tobacco, pills, pornography, a mountain of junk food and more. Ceaselessly inventive and thrillingly savage, this is a tale of life lived without restraint; of money, the terrible things it can do and the disasters it can precipitate. A novel of wit and satire aimed at questioning our relationship with money and consumerism. Dazzling prose and caustic wit propel this novel along a course that pokes holes in what defines our identities and the human condition as a whole. Themes: Drugs, Masculinity, Hedonism, Money Suggested companion texts: American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson Poetry of Alan Ginsberg The Handmaid’s Tale/Margaret Atwood Set in twenty-first century America, Atwood depicts a society that has grown both culturally and physically sterile under a religious fundamentalist dictatorship. Only a small number of women are still fertile, and these so-called ‘handmaids’ are both prized for and reduced to their reproductive function, being assigned to wealthy and powerful men in order to bear their children. The story focuses on one of these handmaids, Offred, and her tale encompasses both life before the rise of fundamentalism, her growing resistance to the regime, and her attempted escape. A classic feminist exploration of sexual politics, set in a dystopian future world. Themes: Gender, Power, Sexuality, Religious Extremism Suggested companion texts: The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter The Book of Joan by Lidia Yuknavitch Daughters of the North by Sarah Hall The Children of Men by P.D. James The Crucible by Arthur Miller Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy and Margaret Atwood If Beale Street Could Talk/James Baldwin Harlem, the black soul of New York City, in the era of Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles. The narrator of Baldwin's novel is Tish nineteen, and pregnant. Her lover Fonny, father of her child, is in jail accused of rape. Flashbacks from their love affair are woven into the compelling struggle of two families to win justice for Fonny. To this love story James Baldwin brings a spare and impassioned intensity, charging it with universal resonance and power. 'If Beale Street Could Talk affirms not only love between a man and a woman, but love of a type that is dealt with only rarely in contemporary fiction - that between members of a family' Joyce Carol Oates Themes: Race, Civil Rights, 1970s America, Family, Romantic Relationships Suggested companion texts: A Passage to India by E.M. Forster Atonement by Ian McEwan The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison Poetry of Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou The Wasp Factory/ Iain Banks “Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different reasons than I'd disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my young cousin Esmerelda, more or less on a whim. That's my score to date. Three. I haven't killed anybody for years, and don't intend to ever again. It was just a stage I was going through.” A dark and twisted Gothic horror story, this book is impossible to put down. Not one for the faint of heart! Themes: Evil, Sexuality, Gender, Morality, Father/Son Relationships Suggested companion texts: The Collector by John Fowles The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides The Sense of an Ending/Julian Barnes Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex- hungry and book-hungry, they would navigate the girl-less sixth form together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they all swore to stay friends for life. Now Tony is retired. He's had a career and a single marriage, a calm divorce. He's certainly never tried to hurt anybody. Memory, though, is imperfect. It can always throw up surprises, as a lawyer's letter is about to prove. A book about memory and how we construct our pasts and the people in them. Themes: Memory, Time, Relationships, Fate, Intertwining Life Paths Suggested companion texts: A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro Howard’s End by E.M.. Forster Oroonoko/ Aphra Behn When Prince Oroonoko's passion for the virtuous Imoinda arouses the jealousy of his grandfather, the lovers are cast into slavery and transported from Africa to the colony of Surinam. Oroonoko's noble bearing soon wins the respect of his English captors, but his struggle for freedom brings about his destruction. Oroonoko was inspired by Aphra Behn’s travels in Africa and her romantic view of the people as ‘noble savages’. The novel also grapples with Behn’s ambiguous attitudes towards African slavery. Themes: Slavery, Race, Colonialism Suggested companion texts: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe Beloved by Toni Morrison Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi Othello by William Shakespeare Any Human Heart/William Boyd Every life is both ordinary and extraordinary, but Logan Mountstuart's - lived from the beginning to the end of the twentieth century - contains more than its fair share of both. As a writer who finds inspiration with Hemingway in Paris and Virginia Woolf in London, as a spy recruited by Ian Fleming and betrayed in the war and as an art-dealer in '60s New York, Logan mixes with the movers and shakers of his times. But as a son, friend, lover and husband, he makes the same mistakes we all do in our search for happiness.